30 January 2015 5:31 PM

Years ago I first read of the extraordinary meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud (also known as AbdulAziz) of Saudi Arabia. This took place soon after the Yalta summit which handed much of Europe to Stalin (and not long before Roosevelt’s death, in Warm Springs, Georgia with his mistress, Lucy Rutherfurd, at his side).

Note that it mentions in passing Winston Churchill’s belated, ill-mannered and failed attempt to emulate the meeting soon afterwards (Churchill knowingly ignored the King’s loathing of smoking and drinking, and alienated him in other ways. The more cunning Roosevelt took great care to please the King, and so got what he wanted ) . Churchill’s meeting went wrong in every conceivable respect.

There are also several pictures, and some colour film, of the Bitter Lake Summit. Roosevelt looks close to death. Ibn Saud looks as a King should look, immensely self-possessed and full of unquestioned power.

The fascinating, picturesque and momentous event, which ought to be world-famous, is almost entirely unknown. The embarking of the King at Jeddah with his entourage (including an astrologer), the carpeting of the decks of the destroyer USS Murphy, and the erection of a tent among her torpedo tubes and gun turrets, the corralling of sheep at her stern, the transfer of the monarch by bosun’s chair to Roosevelt’s ship, the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, are all wonderful enough anyway.

But the subject matter of the meeting is even better. First, there are the beginnings of US military protection for Saudi Arabia in return for American dominance of the Saudi oilfields (which had begun to flow only in 1938 and which the US oil companies had penetrated in competition with the then powerful British Empire and its oil interests). Then there is the King’s absolute refusal to countenance American support for Jewish settlement in what would soon be Israel.

I have received the communication which Your Majesty sent me under date of March 10, 1945, in which you refer to the question of Palestine and to the continuing interest of the Arabs in current developments affecting that country.

I am gratified that Your Majesty took this occasion to bring your views on this question to my attention and I have given the most careful attention to the statements which you make in your letter. I am also mindful of the memorable conversation which we had not so long ago and in the course of which I had an opportunity to obtain so vivid an impression of Your Majesty’s sentiments on this question.

Your Majesty will recall that on previous occasions I communicated to you the attitude of the American Government toward Palestine and made clear our desire that no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. Your Majesty will also doubtless recall that during our recent conversation I assured you that I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people.

It gives me pleasure to renew to Your Majesty the assurances which you have previously received regarding the attitude of my Government and my own, as Chief Executive, with regard to the question of Palestine and to inform you that the policy of this Government in this respect is unchanged.

I desire also at this time to send you my best wishes for Your Majesty’s continued good health and for the welfare of your people.

Your Good Friend,

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, would later override this by recognising Israel in 1948, and committing the USA to its support. His decision is believed to have been based on electoral considerations. The tension between the two positions has endured in US policy ever since.

So in many ways the foundations were laid for the modern Middle East, the overpowering of a failing British empire by an ambitious America, a contradiction at the heart of American policy between its Saudi alliance and its friendship for the Zionist project, all floating upon a sea of oil.

So I knew I had come to the right place when I noted that the meeting provided the title and the main opening scene of Adam Curtis’s astonishing new documentary ‘Bitter Lake’ (the Roosevelt-Ibn Saud meeting took place on the Great Bitter Lake, part of the Suez Canal) .

Anyone interested in this occasion must have an unconventional (and therefore interesting) approach to postwar history. He must be able to tell the difference between what was important and what was famous.

And so it proves. This programme has never been and, so far as I know, never will be shown on the BBC as such . But it is , rather oddly, available on the BBC iplayer . I am told this was not the result of any BBC rejection of the idea, but a bit of enterprise on the part of the person in charge of iplayer, who sees it as a possible platform for original programming ( and who also doesn’t mind Mr Curtis’s, ah, unusual approach to film-making).

I do urge anyone who can to watch it. It has several marvellous moments, perhaps the best being a British cultural envoy trying to explain Marcel Duchamp’s alleged art ( a urinal) to a group of Afghans, all part of our ludicrous attempt to ‘civilise’ this ancient country, something the West (and then the USSR) has been trying to do, with disastrous results, since the Americans built the canals of Helmand after World War Two. At least Britain’s 19th-century interventions were honest bits of colonialist piracy, shamelessly self-interested.

The thing that has marked all these interventions has been the outsiders’ utter failure to understand the country.

The simple, devastating explanation of how and why Britain’s Helmand military intervention went so completely wrong from the beginning- despite its good intentions -is so good, so concise and so powerful that it alone justifies the film.

There is also far too much footage showing what the words ‘collateral damage’ actually means. Do I mean this? can there be enough? I mean, too much for the mind to want to take in, not too much to drive the message home - this is what a terrified child looks like, this is what a maimed child and her father look like, in the clinic, seeking help and yet knowing that their lives have been irreversibly changed for the worse and it will not get better.

All this is accompanied by a great deal of what might be called visual music, in which Curtis surprises, captivates, creates in the mind a demand to know what is happening, and then answers it. See it, please. I’m told you have until 23rd February.

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18 December 2014 4:11 PM

When I first published ‘The Cameron Delusion’, under its original title of ‘The Broken Compass’, the distinguished parodist Craig Brown tried to satirise my index in ‘Private Eye. Since the index itself is satirical (I love doing my own indexes now computers have made the job so simple) he didn’t do all that well, and , annoyingly, he didn’t mention the name of the book. But never mind.

One of my favourite entries was under ‘A’, and along the lines of ‘Afghanistan, a very long way from North Atlantic’ (I’m in the middle of an internal office move and can’t lay hands on an actual copy). The point was simple. What was a body called ‘The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ doing intervening in a complex tribal struggle on the edge of the Himalayas? The location really couldn’t be further from the North Atlantic, either in miles or in nature.

It is odd that nobody (except, occasionally, me) really seeks the answer to this question. The reinvention of NATO is one of the strangest and most instructive changes of the post-Cold War world. It sits in the middle of the diplomatic landscape, a great looming monolith. Why is this? What is it for? Whom or what is it against?

My explanation for the lack of curiosity is the usual one. People are, for the most part, willing propaganda-swallowers. Some of these such as Mr ‘P’, the Wiki Man, actually like the taste so much that they can’t easily be weaned off it. I’ll pause for a moment to illustrate this, before continuing with the main topic of NATO.

Mr P’s struggle to avoid the truth about Ukraine has now become heroic. For instance, in a recent contribution he wrote:

‘Aggression usually is, and in fact is defined as, an action detrimental to the aggressee and against the aggressee's will.’

But he still can’t somehow acknowledge that Ukraine’s change (following a violent foreign-sponsored mob putsch) from being a non-aligned country to being a member of an anti-Russian economic and political alliance is not detrimental to the interests of Russia and against Russia’s (openly and repeatedly expressed) will.

Mr ‘P’ also competes for the Obtuseness Olympics when he writes: ‘In response to my point that tanks rolling over borders *is* aggression, Mr Hitchens, wafting this thought aside, merely opines, Humpty Dumpty-like, that aggression can mean many things, and in this case what Mr Hitchens wants it to mean.’

This is not what I say at all, and he knows it. I say that Russia’s actions are a defensive response to aggression, and that to pretend that the realignment of Ukraine through foreign intervention and the violent overthrow of its government is not aggression is to deceive yourself and (perhaps) others.

I’ll reproduce here part of Richard Pipes’s interesting summary of the traditional European Christian diplomacy (based on the Stoic concept of the Law of Nature ) which the Bolsheviks overthrew in 1917 ( having themselves been put in power by a German-financed putsch, which could be described as ‘aggression’, and was certainly an act of war).

‘International relations are confined to contacts between governments: It is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population’.

We all know this in any case. How many times have I asked the following questions and received no answers to them from Mr ‘P’ or his allies. How would we in Britain react if EU politicians appeared among pro-independence crowds in Edinburgh or Glasgow, distributing biscuits to them and affirming their solidarity with them?

And how would the EU and NATO and the State Department react if Russian politicians appeared amidst Russian-speaking crowds in Riga or Tallinn, handing out biscuits and urging a new Association Agreement with the Eurasian Union?

They do not answer because they know that such behaviour would be greeted by all right-thinking persons with rage and protests, and rightly so. And that it is directly comparable to the behaviour described in these links, which actually took place:

Mr P also says ‘Mr Hitchens here concedes that Ukraine desires to join the EU, which is central to my overall point. ‘. I am not sure that I ‘concede’ any such thing. Many Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs undoubtedly wish to join the EU, because they hope it will provide an unceasing pipeline of money from which they can, er, benefit. The elites of many poor and bankrupt countries likewise believe, rightly or wrongly, that EU membership will lead them to prosperity.

I should have thought that Greece was a good example of the general dangers of this belief. As or the peoples of these countries, they are, alas, as ill-informed and as easily-manipulated as people generally are. Personally, I have always thought that the aim of the EU was political, not economic, and I have found that most informed continental people agree with me. It is only in Britain that we persist in seeing the EU as an economic project. The adventures of the Euro seem to make this point quite well.

Whether the Ukrainian people are any better-informed about the meaning of EU membership for their lives than other populations rushed into the body by their elites, I do not presume to know. The word’ Ukraine’ is not in fact synonymous with ‘Government of Ukraine’. I have no doubt that the current government of Ukraine, installed following a violent unconstitutional putsch, favours the closest possible relations with the EU. But, given that this putsch was backed by the EU, this is hardly a surprise.

Mr ‘P’ makes some silly remarks about Cuba, which is plainly in the USA’s sphere of influence, and whose problems for the past 50 years stem from Soviet meddling in the Caribbean.

This was comparable in provocative irresponsibility to current American meddling in central Europe. It is precisely because the USA regards Cuba as legitimately part of its sphere that it has invaded and then blockaded that island. Is this aggression, or legitimate response to provocation I should say the latter, while describing Soviet Russia’s behaviour in Cuba as aggressive, even before the installation of the famous missiles.

Russia’s current interests in Cuba are vestigial and, I suspect, no more than mischievous retaliation for American meddling in the Caucasus. On my last visit to Cuba, Chinese involvement, and of course Venezuelan involvement, were miles more significant.

Also his reference to Humpty Dumpty is (as I have pointed out to him before, but he paid no attention) wrong. The point about Humpty Dumpty’s use of words was that he used them to mean whatever he liked, and for purposes wholly unrelated to their original use. Thus ‘There’s glory for you’ meant, in Humpty-speak ‘There’s a nice knock-down argument for you’.

My dispute with Mr ‘P’ is not a semantic one and certainly does not involve the total misuse of English. We agree about what aggression *is* in general. Our difference concerns the question of whether there is any other form of aggression apart from the despatch of tanks and troops across a border. Of course there is. But Mr ’P’ knows that his argument will collapse in ruins as soon as he acknowledges this, so he doesn’t acknowledge it. There is a word for this sort of behaviour, but I have forgotten what it is. Let’s just describe it as ‘self-serving anti-thinking’.

Mr ‘P’ offers Russia some good advice about its economy (I can’t imagine why they haven’t taken it, can you? Perhaps it isn’t as easy as it looks), thus : ‘producing goods people want to buy and opening up markets into which people want to sell. A step in that direction would be to rid the system of ex-KGB mafioso politics and oligarchical economics, get to allowing free expression throughout the media and in public discourse’ (actually speech in Russia is more free than he seems to imagine, the problem being much more that of access to major media platforms, much as it is here only more directly state-influenced).

Actually, this is advice that Britain could just as readily take to heart, since our indebted economy, with its miserable manufacturing base, its poor exports and its over-dependence on the City (plus its long insulation from reality by North Sea Oil) is really not all that much more healthy than Russia’s, and couldn’t withstand the sort of attack on it now being made on Russia’s economy.

But his final paragraph enables me to slip back into the general discussion of NATO. Mr P’ writes (first quoting me) : "The even deeper mystery is why anyone in Britain thinks that EU eastward expansion is something this country needs to or should support. What’s in it for us?"

Mr ‘P’ asks :’ What does one make of this? Is there something 'in it for us' if we don't support it? Russia won't attack us if we don't support it. Is that what's 'in it for us'? We'll get a good deal on gas prices. Is that it, or something like it? Is Mr Hitchens an appeasement-monkey?’

I respond that this is just a smear. Foreign policy is generally conducted for the benefit of the country involved. Why then is Britain so keenly joining in on the side of Brussels against Moscow? I cannot myself see what direct interest Britain has in taking the EU’s side in its dispute with Russia. Britain buys very little gas from Russia, relying far more on Norway, and has no strong commercial ties with Russia which would be affected by this conflict. I recommend, as I have always recommended, staying out of a quarrel that isn’t ours and discouraging dogmatic hotheads who seem to think it as a contest between the Shire and Mordor.

Mr ;P’ is one of these, it seems. He says :’ Why should we support it? Well for one thing we would be supporting the aspirations of the former and courageous Soviet satellites, understandably still nervous of the ghosts of politburos past, now rapidly becoming a very real apparition of Tsarisms past. ‘

People in this part of the world are indeed understandably nervous, but not just of politburos (vanished) and tsars (even more defunct). They have reason to be nervous of Germany and its ‘federative empire’ too, and if Mr ‘P’ had spent much time in that region he would know that the fear and the pressure are not always in one direction only.

I am not sure what makes these former Soviet satellites, now EU satellites, so ‘courageous’. What have they done that is so brave? They and their people behaved just as we would behave in the same circumstances – sharing a bed with a hippo on one side and an elephant on the other - very carefully.

Having gained, briefly, actual independence from one empire, they have scuttled, almost as one, under the skirts of another. I should have thought it would have been braver to stay out of both. In any case, I fail to see what it matters to me, whether they look to Moscow or Brussels, as long as the conflict isn’t pushed to the extent of war.

But here we are again at NATO. Lord Ismay famously described its original purpose as keeping the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out …in all cases the preposition referred to Western Europe.

Implicit in NATO’s whole existence was that it accepted absolutely the Soviet domination of the continent from Marienborn eastwards. NATO ignored the 1953 crushing of the East Berlin workers’ rising, the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian rising, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring, the crushing of Polish Solidarity in the 1980s.

It also had no interest in anything outside Western Europe. It had nothing important to say about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (other people began a long and dangerous process by seeking to oppose that) , nor about China’s crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests.

In some ways more interesting, it was pretty much of a spare part when two if its members almost came to blows over Cyprus in 1974. Turkey, then and now a member of NATO in good standing, invaded and seized North Cyprus.

This was a far more troubled event than Russia’s seizure of Crimea 40 years later, but it has some interesting parallels. Like Russia’s action, it followed a violent foreign-backed putsch which installed a government in Nicosia that was as hostile to Turkey (and to Turkish concerns) as the post-putsch Kiev government was hostile to Russia and Russian concerns.

Its purpose was to turn Cyprus into a Greek island, rather than ( as it then was) an independent state carefully non-aligned between Greece and Turkey. Yet as far as I know, no Greek ships, planes, troops or tanks were directly involved. Was this therefore aggression?

Obviously it was, unless you are Mr ‘P’, who presumably attributes it to a desire by ‘Cyprus’ (the divisions in whose population he will not be able to acknowledge as real, if he applies to it the same lens he applies to Ukraine) to be aligned with Greece. But will he? I doubt it. For this was a putsch by the ‘right-wing’ .

At the time, Greece was of course a military dictatorship. Turkey was not, but the army stood behind the government in a pretty convincing way, and Turkish governments which annoyed the army tended not to last very long in those days.

Anyway, there were many atrocities during this affair, and large numbers of people were frightened or driven from beloved homes. An entire city, Famagusta, remains deserted to this day as a result. Nicosia remains divided, as does Cyprus itself. Nobody ( apart from Turkey) recognizes the state of Northern Cyprus set up by Turkey.

But on the other hand, there are no sanctions against Turkey, and no attempts to destabilise the Turkish economy, just repeated patient attempts to reach a negotiated settlement. Greece and Cyprus have subsequently been allowed to join the EU (*in the original version of this post I wrongly stated that Turkey has been permitted to join the EU, which I knew perfectly well was not the case. I suspect this mistake just goes to show how the EU and NATO have become increasingly confused) , despite being in some ways party to this rather disgraceful running sore of a conflict.

Britain, which actually possesses large military bases next door, and was generally thought to have some lingering responsibility for an island it once ruled and had fought quite hard to hang on to, sat back and did nothing as the Turks parachuted down. Those who regarded the behaviour of the international community at the time as shameful were generally ignored. There was a great lack of blowhards demanding that we went on a war footing against Turkey.

Now, if our behaviour over Crimea and Ukraine is governed by any sort of universal law, advocates of the New Cold War and believers in the ‘Putin is the new Hitler’ theory will have to explain to me (once again) the lack of consistency in our approach here.

There is nothing new in this behaviour by Mr Erdogan . Yet his wickedness is little-known in this country (the other day a presenter of Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, who really ought to be in touch with such things, was so unfamiliar with him that she did not know that the ‘g’ in ‘Erdogan’ is silent.

I wrote this introduction to a speech I didn’t in the end deliver to the Cambridge Union a few weeks ago (there wasn’t time , alas):

‘His regime has imprisoned 70 journalists, does sinister deals with Islamist terrorists, uses ultra-violence against rebel ethnic groups, railroads its political opponents into jail on plainly invented charges, brutally gasses, clubs and even kills peaceful protestors. He is a crude demagogue, given to violent and intolerant language. He has moved from being a parliamentary prime minister to an all-powerful directly elected president. His media are cowed or compliant His troops illegally occupy another country’s sovereign territory, where he maintains a puppet government.’

While he is in many ways similar to Mr Putin, he has for years been the poster-boy of the Economist magazine, the head of state of a NATO member - and his misdeeds are barely-known to the noisy moralizers of the British media.’

Regular readers here will know of my interest in this NATO head of state, for example:

Some of you will have noticed Mr Erdogan's odd behaviour towards Islamic State and Syria in recent months, not perhaps the action of a close ally of the ‘West’.

Well, all of this would make perfect sense if we still confronted a potent Soviet threat, Admiral Gorchkov’s huge Black Sea Fleet (now mostly razor blades) , the Soviet Army parked up against the borders of Turkey in Armenia and of Iran in Azerbaijan, and all these powers devoted to the cause of establishing Soviet power across the globe, directed by a Communist Politburo. Against such a power, you aren’t too choosy about whose help you accept.

But we don’t. We face a declining, shrinking Russia whose principal sin is to complain when we try to diminish it further, whereupon we accuse it of aggression’.

What is NATO for? Why wasn’t it wound up, as was its mirror image, the Warsaw Pact, when the Cold War ended? Do you keep a mower when you don’t have a garden? Why then have an anti-Soviet alliance when there isn’t a Soviet Union?

In the years of Boris Yeltsin, as I understood it, Russia was generally regarded as a friendly power. We happily stood by, even helped, when Yeltsin retained power in a rigged election, and when he bombarded his own parliament with tanks, and sent troops into the state TV headquarters. So against what threat did we extend its umbrella into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states?

What does it stand for, if Turkey can remain a member in good standing? Democracy? Sort of, though Turkey isn’t much more democratic than Mr Putin’s Russia. Liberty and the rule of law? Hardly. Mr Erdogan is not very good at that, and nor (whisper it quietly) are some of the other members. Rigid adherence to International Law? Again, not while Turkey continues to occupy North Cyprus. Absence of corruption? Ha ha. Freedom of the press? Not exactly. And so it goes on. And what on earth was NATO doing in Afghanistan? Who knows? Didn't work out, anyway.

In considering these anomalies, you may just begin to see the outlines of what may be happening, You will certainly, if you allow yourself to think about these facts , be liberated from the propaganda of the new Cold War’ advocates, and the people who think that one lot of oligarchs in Ukraine are princes of peace, love and beauty, while an equally unlovely bunch of Oligarchs in Moscow are from the nether pit of hell.

But, as we so often find, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think. Doesn’t the old saying go something like that?

02 October 2014 2:27 PM

A lot of David Cameron’s speech in Birmingham was either weary sloganizing, crude electoral claptrap or cliché, so I don’t propose to do a complete analysis of the text (which is currently available here http://press.conservatives.com/ )

But I thought I would look at some of parts of it that seemed to me to be interesting, not necessarily in ways that Mr Cameron or his aides and speechwriters would want them to be interesting. By the way, anyone watching the BBC news channel’s coverage of the speech would have noted that the commentators selected to comment on it afterwards were *both* from the heart of the Tory project, and both from the Blairite ‘Times’ stable. They were Lord (Danny) Finkelstein,long sympathetic to the Cameron project; and Tim Montgomerie, of ‘Conservative Home’. Wouldn’t it have been a touch more balanced to have included a person sympathetic to UKIP, and a person sympathetic to Labour? Also there was a curious segment in which representatives leaving the hall were asked for their opinions. The first two were gushing, one of them embarrassingly turning out to be a keen EUphile. But the third was quite rude about it. It seems to me that it’s quite remarkable to find an activist , who has probably paid to be there, being rude about his own leader’s speech on live TV. The BBC commentator seemed to me to be anxious to portray the speech as a success, and to have been discombobulated by the critic.

What is Patriotism really?

I would first of all note that the Second World War is still the moral gospel of modern politics. Somehow or other, it is confused in his mind with his (pro tem) victory over Scottish separatism. I think this has something to do with the Union Jack. The straightforward, unashamedly patriotic idea of defending the Union because it makes us strong , independent of the continent and less vulnerable to back-door attack ( a clear and honest reason for doing so) is obviously unattractive to him. He doesn’t see the Union in this way, and is very happy with Britain’s post 1945 return to continental entanglements and dependence. Any wars we may have fought, therefore, must be for similarly non-patriotic, idealistic purposes.

He described his constituent, Patrick Churchill, as having been ‘fighting fascism’ in Normandy in 1944, a curiously leftish description of that conflict. Very few actual ‘Fascists’ were involved by 1944, Italy having got rid of Mussolini and changed sides by then. I suspect Patrick Churchill thought back in 1944 that he was fighting ‘Germans’. Many people in Europe, who had done the same before, came to that conclusion. It was a rather particular experience, unlike fighting anyone else. My mother, who was bombed by them, and my father, many of whose friends were killed by them and whose life was in ceaseless perils from their aircraft and ships for months on end, both referred to them as ‘Germans’ during my 1950s childhood when the subject was still all-embracing.

My mother in particular could never abide hearing the German language spoken, saying that it made her shudder. I think she was exaggerating a bit, but not much. Years later we had a German ex-PoW as a neighbour, and ny parents got on perfectly well with him as far as I could see (in fact I think my father had some respect for him as a fellow fighting man from the war) . But that was the 1960s.

It only became an ideological war later.

Mr Cameron unwittingly employs the language of the Comintern

But I don’t think Mr Cameron knows that, Having grown up since the 1960s, he probably uses these Marxoid categories himself without thinking, not knowing that the Soviet Union and the Comintern popularised the term ‘Fascism’ for the Axis enemy (and later as a general boo-word and all-purpose anti-conservative smear) for very specific reasons.

The first was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, as it was widely known ( a recent book on this astonishing alliance, reviewed on this blog a few days ago, can be purchased here

This made the Comintern and the Kremlin a little nervous about the word ‘Nazi’, which would trigger, in millions of minds, memories of the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty.

They had another difficulty, too. ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’ and once again makes that awkward connection between the two murderous, utopian dogmas of the 20th century, whose profound similarities the Left have always wished us to ignore - and which we all had to ignore anyway when we became Stalin’s ally in 1941. They had so much in common - power worship, leader-worship, militarism, censorship, secret police, destruction of private life , thought control, torture, perversion of the young, turning of children against their parents, hatred of Christianity, means-and-ends ‘morals’, single parties, uniforms, shouting, people’s courts, show trials, labour camps, controlled media, cowed academies, intellectual apologists. One wanted to exterminate on the grounds of race, the other on the grounds of class.

But if we say we were fighting ‘fascism’ in 1944, we don’t have to think about that.

Anyway, I think it culturally interesting that a Conservative Premier should use such language.

Is there really any link between World War Two and Afghanistan?

Then there was this elision : ‘The heirs to those who fought on the beaches of Northern France are those fighting in Afghanistan today. For thirteen years, young men and women have been serving our country there.’

Is that really so? The Afghan War , futile by any measure, was a war of choice in which professional soldiers did as they were told by politicians they don’t respect (and were of course thrown to the wolves if they ever got caught doing anything nasty) . The 1939-45 war, whatever its many faults, often discussed here, was not in the same category in nature, cause, importance or scale. To try to cover up the fact that, for five long years, Mr Cameron sucked up to the Murdoch press by continuing our Afghan engagement, by equating it with the liberation of France in 1944 is, in my view, a bit much.

If politicians knew what servicemen really thought of them, they would never try to pose in the reflected shine of military glory. They would be too embarrassed.

Can we afford to drop these bombs?

Now, again with the frantic encouragement of the Murdoch press, we are using World War Three equipment and weapons to bomb a few 4X4 pick-up trucks in Iraq. I gather each of these missions costs something like £210,000 an hour ( see http://news.sky.com/story/1342768/how-much-will-airstrikes-on-is-cost-taxpayer , and yes, I know this is a Murdoch outlet. He’s not all bad ) , but that’s if they bring their bombs back. If they use them, the mission cost can rise far higher. And yet we are a bankrupt country. How can we afford this?

The only purpose of this war is political, to try to look good at home to the few dim people who think Britain is still a world power, and to suck up to the Americans (who I suspect don’t care whether we turn up or not).

Shamelessly, Mr Cameron intoned ‘The threat is Islamist extremist terrorism – and it has found a new, hellish crucible – with ISIL, in Iraq and Syria. These people are evil, pure and simple. They kill children; rape women; threaten non-believers with genocide; behead journalists and aid workers.’

Well, what does he think is going in Libya, whose fate is his personal responsibility for the rest of his life. Or in Nigeria? Has he studied the governance of our ally Saudi Arabia? Or noted that Western air-attacks on Libya undoubtedly (though accidentally)killed children, as was reliably reported at the time?

As for ‘These people are evil, pure and simple.’, so are the IRA, with whose frontmen he willingly does business.

Did Oxford make a mistake?

All these points have been made many times about his vapourings, by many others apart from me. He must be aware of the criticism. He is supposed, by the examiners of Oxford University, to have a first-class mind. Yet he does not moderate or adapt the crude, Sun-type language. Is this because he is shameless, or because Oxford made a mistake?

As for ‘There is no “walk on by” option. Unless we deal with ISIL, they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets,’, this is simply untrue. The Iraqi Sunni fanatics probably have as little idea of where Birmingham is as Mr Cameron does of where Mosul is. Most major countries have indeed chosen to ‘walk on by’. I don’t think that will make the Islamists any more likely to attack them

Then there’s a lot of macho bluster about taking passports away from, and locking up, people who , more consistently than Her Majesty’s Government, have stuck with the (admittedly mad and unwise) policy of aiding the Syrian rebels which Mr Cameron (and the interesting Brooks Newmark) wanted to adopt so much - until Parliament got in the way.

For the Syrian rebels were and are of course the same people as ‘ISIL.’

England is, well, a lot bigger than the other members of the UK, yah?

Then we have a section on ‘English votes for English laws’ - The fact that England is far bigger, more populous and richer than any of the other nations of the UK, and has different religious and political traditions as well, still seems to escape Mr Cameron and other Tories. Once you’ve accepted that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different from England, then you’re going to have to live with anomalies like the West Lothian Question. If you don’t want to live with them, then why encourage these nations to stay in the UK at all, let alone claim you love them so much that they mustn’t go?

If London starts demanding autonomy, as well it may, will the Tories take the same view, denying London MPs a vote on English laws? I don’t think so. Well, in that case, it’s not a principle.

The First Thumping Terminological Inexactitude

Then we get the first really thumping terminological inexactitude of the speech:

‘Believe me: coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do.

And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies……based on Conservative values……leading a majority Conservative Government.’

Mr Cameron was never forced by anyone to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He did not ‘have to’ do it. He could have tried to run a minority government, proposed a programme, been defeated, gone to the country and won or lost.

He could have let the Liberal Democrats and Labour form a minority coalition and let them tear themselves to bits before forcing a confidence vote and again causing an election.

He could have negotiated far more fiercely with the Liberal Democrats, who would have sacrificed limbs and organs to get into office for the first time in peacetime for about 90 years. The LibDem negotiators have said since that they were astonished how readily their Tory negotiating partners gave in to their demands, and even asked them if they wanted anything else on top.

He could have proposed a three-year partnership with the freedom to dissolve it before the election. But no, he went for a rigid and detailed pact, and then guaranteed it for five full years with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act.

All these actions were matters of choice. The choices he made suggest to me that he wanted office above all ( he certainly seems to enjoy it) , and was ready to pay a very heavy price for it .

They also suggest that he had known for some months that he was going to lose, and had thought deeply about what he would do if so. And the deal that he made suggests that he saw the LibDems as an important ally against his own conservative faction. Like the absent Jorkins in ‘David Copperfield’, fear of a LibDem walkout could always be employed to browbeat anti-EU, pro-grammar school types into giving way. Mr Cameron and his allies have always had far more in common with Nick Clegg that they do with ‘Cornerstone’ and its members.

But the arrangement was founded on the belief that Tory conservatives had nowhere else to go. This was true in 2010. It isn’t now. They have dug a tunnel called UKIP since then, and more and more of them are scurrying along it to freedom.

Mr Cameron misses a bit out of his speech

Mr Cameron’s speech was like Ed Miliband’s in two ways. One (in practice rather than rhetoric) he totally ignored the vast deficit which his government increases every week with profligate borrowing. Despite this position of hopeless indebtedness, in which tax receipts cannot be stretched to match the government’s outgoings, he blithely promised tax cuts worth (I believe ) £7,000,000,000 a year. At the same time he promised to safeguard the NHS’ vast budget, which is a bottomless commitment and will strain every other area of spending. Where *is* all this to come from? We are already borrowing £2,000,000,000 a week just to make ends meet. And every penny of that adds to our huge budget for debt servicing.

Two, he spent most of it apparently ignoring another vast and important fact – the existence of UKIP, daily taking form him more votes, more members and more donors.

He did not mention UKIP at all until the last few minutes of his oration, and then not in a serious fashion. Yet his whole purpose was to damage UKIP He pretended throughout that his real opponent was Ed Miliband, a man who struggles to find and show any difference between his plans and the policies of the present government. In fact his main opponent is Nigel Farage, a man who actually disagrees with him and appeals to many of his voters and supporters, and whose breakthrough offers a long-term threat to Mr Cameron and all who sail in him.

Two Phantom Governments are described

Mr Cameron displayed to the electorate two imaginary governments – one a sort of Bolshevik Milibandite spectre which – he implied – was against private education and would ruin the country even more than it has already been ruined by Mr Osborne’s debt-driven housing bubble boom, the bill for which must come in pretty soon.

And the other a sort of Angelic Ghost of Christmas Past, an actual majority Tory government of the type that hasn’t existed for 17 long years, because the Tories can’t win a Commons majority.

This phantasm will fulfil all the ‘promises’ that Tory central office feeds every few months to what’s left of the Tory press . There’s all that stuff, dredged up in great scoops near elections, about being tough with the EU. There’s that ‘British Bill of Rights’ that has been roaming round the edge of the playing field waiting to bat for years now, but whose face we never see (I suspect that if we could see it, it would look remarkably like the Human Rights Act, only with a different name).

There are those tax cuts that can’t possibly be afforded (though what happened to the old inheritance tax promise from 2010?) .

We are proud of our Green Belt Policy and we are building on it

There are those cheap houses. This pledge at least is partly being fulfilled. The Tories’ friends, the developers, are chewing up great tracts of countryside to build more rows of mean, cramped hutches, from which mortgagees can then commute vast distances on choked roads and decrepit railways, to underpaid, insecure jobs, pausing only to stash their infant children in state-subsidised day-orphanages. British liberty reborn, eh?

Actually, anyone who *can* remember the last Tory majority government will recall that it was pretty much the same as the one we have now, monstrously politically correct, hopelessly pro-EU, obsessed with flashy gimmicks and centralisation in education. Its only good policy was the one it was forced into totally against its will – departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which boosted the economy just in time for the Blairites to plunder it again in 1997.

Trying to re-fight the 1992 Election, but without Neil Kinnock, and with UKIP

The election Mr Cameron wants to fight is the 1992 one which extended the Major era. To do so he has to portray Ed Miliband as Neil Kinnock, which he isn’t, and to pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist, which it does.

He also has to pretend that people like me, and I suspect there are quite a lot of them, are as willing to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt as they were in 1992. And he has to pretend that the Tory Party membership, voting reserve and organisation are anything like as good as they were in 1992.

If his recovery were real, he might manage it. As it is a matter of ‘meagre ‘self-employment’, zero-hours contracts and a housing bubble, mostly confined to the better-off bits of the South of England, I think he may be in for a surprise. Certainly, no opinion poll suggests a Tory majority government, or has done for many years.

We all went to bed with David Cameron in 2010, and woke up with Nick Clegg. After that experience, waking up with Ed Miliband isn’t really going to be much of a shock. Mr Cameron would much rather lose to Ed Miliband than to Nigel Farage, because his project, such as it is, would be safe in Mr Miliband’s hands. And ask yourself this, honestly: In a seat where the Tories can’t win, do you think Mr Cameron would rather it fell to UKIP or to Labour?

Their hypocrisy drives me mad. Our hypocrisy doesn’t

Now we come to the section on education.

‘The biggest risk to all this is Labour. You know what drives me the most mad about them?

The hypocrisy.’

There then follows this confused passage about Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman, who has struggled throughout his tenure to find any substantial policy differences with the Tories

Mr Cameron said :’Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary – like me – had one of the best educations money can buy.’

This true. But look at what comes next:

‘But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.’

Really? I know of no plan by Labour to abolish private fee-paying schools. If you can pay the fees ( and few can) Labour’s happy to let you do so, just like the Tories.

The Prime Minister then mangled facts and logic out of all shape and sense, saying:: ’He (Mr Hunt) went to an independent school that wasn’t set up by a local authority…’

That’s the thing about independent schools. They weren’t set up by local authorities. They are private foundations. Hence the name.

Mr Cameron continued ‘…but no, he doesn’t want charities and parents to set up schools for your children.’

This is the one rather tiny difference between the two parties, which are more or less united on the gimmicky, worthless policy of rebranding comprehensives as ‘academies’ or a something of the kind. Labour doesn’t favour the ‘free schools’ which have, to put it mildly, had a mixed record since they were allowed, and which are as remote as Tibet for most people, since there are so few of them. Not all of us can (or want to) live near Toby Young. And if there are any instances of rich Tory politicians, or Tory politicians living within reach of existing selective state schools, sending their children to Free Schools, I’d like to hear them. Michael Gove himself , living within yards of an academy he had ceaselessly praised, and not all that far from a free school too, chose for his daughter a traditional single-sex Church-based former grammar school. Who could blame him, if it weren’t for his political activities? But Mr Gove’s political hypocrisy escaped Mr Cameron’s fierce eye.

Our premier went on: ‘I tell you – Tristram Hunt and I might both have been educated at some of the best schools in our country.But here’s the difference: You, Tristram – like the rest of the Labour Party – want to restrict those advantages……I want to spread them to every child in Britain.’

American readers baffled by my previous posting on Theresa May’s secondary schooling should grasp the real point here. Until 1965, Britain had many hundreds of first-class state schools, free to the bright children of poor homes, which rivalled the best independent (fee-paying) schools in the quality of their education. By their nature, they were selective, and not everyone could go to them. Entrance was decided by an examination generally thought to be fair.

Tory and Labour parties, influenced by left-wing ideologues who reasoned that if everyone couldn’t have a good schooling, nobody but the rich should get one, shut almost all these schools down. Now, good schooling is only available ( as in the USA) to those who can pay fees, or those who can buy homes in the catchment areas of the better High Schools, or otherwise wangle their children into them. Religion, or simply knowing the complicated rules of admission, is often the ticket to a good High School. For a detailed case of this, see here

I have in the past commented on Mr Cameron’s references in party political circumstances to the heartbreaking illness and death of his son. I will try not to say any more than this, about the passage on the subject in his Birmingham speech. I really don’t think this has anything to do with policy. I have no doubt that the NHS did all that it could for Mr Cameron’s son, and that the doctors, nurses and others involved exerted themselves greatly in kindness and skill. Likewise I am sure that, had the Camerons hired non-NHS help to aid them in the task of caring for the child, they too would have been models of goodness. Nor do I doubt the great devotion of the Camerons themselves to their child. Heaven knows I would not let political disagreement prevent me from seeing common humanity in an opponent, and sympathizing as far as it is possible to do with his grief and pain.

Most people, confronted with a seriously ill child, will behave in this way, and not expect to be thanked for it. It is what we all know we ought to do. But that was because they were good people in highly moral professions, not because they worked for the NHS, not because the NHS is organised as it is or funded as it is.

These are different arguments. I think they should be kept separate from each other. The NHS is a vast political and economic problem for this country, as well as a vital employer in many parts of Britain where employment is very hard to find. It is a problem which cannot easily be solved, either by simply spending more money, or by reorganisation, or by the market. I don’t think any political party wants to destroy it . I am not by any means sure any of them know how to save it. I would favour a multi-party truce on it, myself , and one in which the mighty weapons of emotion are laid aside.

Not exactly crime-busting

Mrs May, whom Mr Cameron described as ‘crime-busting’, is nothing of the kind. The government, ably assisted by a sedentary, centralized and bureaucratic police force, has dealt with crime by redefining it. Much that normal people have long viewed as crime is no longer classified or recorded as such , let alone deterred or prosecuted.

Mrs May’s supposedly miraculous survival in what is always said to be a risky job, Home Secretary, is largely due to the removal of some of her department’s trickiest responsibilities, now handled by the ‘Justice’ Ministry. Much of the rest is down to her use of first-rate spin-doctors to feed an image of cool competence to willing media sources – and of course to Mr Cameron’s pressing need for a senior female figure in his government, to please the politically correct faction. Who else is there?

Our immigration policy? Posturing, bluster and inaction as usual

The speech contained no explanation of what Mr Cameron actually plans to do about mass immigration (the only thing that would make any difference, immediate departure from the EU, is impossible under our current leadership). I have discussed elsewhere the problems of the Tory position on the EU

So I would only say that it is deeply misleading to describe the next election as a ‘choice’ between the Tories and Labour. Those two parties are so close that most people’s lives will be unaffected by a change from one to the other, or vice versa. The only change available to us is a revolution in our party system in which both Labour and Tory parties are made obsolete, and new parties arise which actually represent the true differences there are among us. Mr Cameron’s main aim is to prevent that revolution from happening. My main aim is to encourage it, for without it there is no hope of the great reforms we so badly need. Please don’t be misled by this stuff.

25 September 2014 12:02 PM

I sense that tomorrow’s Parliamentary debate on bombing the Middle East has been rigged in advance at the top. But it can't be rigged at the bottom. Individual MPs are still free. There is still time for you to telephone or e-mail your MP to let him or her know that you see no reason to rush into yet another stupid conflict in the Muslim world. And indeed that it is precisely because of the emotive, hurried, propaganda-driven decisions to go to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (and the West’s unwise support of the ‘Arab Spring’) that we have already lost so many lives, and made the Muslim world so much more unstable and dangerous than it would have been had we done nothing at all.

But you can’t just do nothing!

Why not? Nothing is often the best thing to do, especially if you are a stony-broke, hopelessly indebted former imperial power which has all its work cut out trying to stay in one piece at home.

One thing is surely plain from our moronic, zig-zagging , contradictory failures in the Islamic world year after year, that those in charge don’t know what they are doing, and that nothing, in all cases, would have been a better course of action than the one they chose.

The obedient ‘reporters’ who reproduce government thinking in the media are telling us that the Prime Minister is ‘confident’ of ‘cross-party’ ( i.e. Labour) support . They are also telling us that the Prime Minister believes that this war against the ‘Islamic State’ will last for many years. Has anybody asked him if this is wishful thinking? Is it perhaps the case that the ‘security’ establishments of this country and the USA actually want us to be engaged in yet another unending conflict? George Orwell knew all about that, and also about how the enemy could switch overnight. He'd have been sourly amused by the fact that the people we now want to bomb are the people we wanted to support a year ago (and yes they are- and we helped to create them too. The claim that if we'd given more support to the Syrian opposition it wouldn't have been taken over by Sunni fanatics is a fantasy. They always dominated it, and would always have pocketed all our support).

In any case, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, will act with cautious responsibility, as he did last year when faced with Mr Cameron’s absurd demand for a bombing war on Syria. The initiative collapsed with amazing speed, and Mr Cameron accepted his defeat without quibble (though his press mouthpieces have ever afterwards denigrated Mr Miliband for actually doing his job and leading the opposition).

A couple of days later, Washington abandoned its plans for an attack on Syria as well.

One explanation of this extraordinary change of mind, one of the swiftest and most total policy reversals I have ever seen in long years of reporting, was provided by Seymour Hersh in the fascinating article to which I link below. Mr Hersh is a distinguished and well-connected journalist, but he is by the nature of his work compelled to rely (as in this case) on sources he cannot ever identify, and which we cannot check.

But history shows that far odder things than this have happened. I have no way of knowing if his suggestions here are correct, but mention them to make it plain that this thesis has been advanced by serious people. I might also add that the Syrian state has since then got rid of its remaining chemical weapons with unexpected speed and efficiency, an event that has tended to be covered, if at all, on the inside pages of unpopular newspapers, because it does not fit the narrative.

Few now remember that there was never any objective proof of the claims that the Assad state had used poison gas on its people. Efforts to produce such proof rather dried up after the clamour for war came to an end. I remain unconvinced.

This is not a question of simple wickedness. The Assad state is clearly capable of terrible actions, and nobody – least of all me – would ever dispute that. But its savagery is rational. It would have been self-destructive madness on the part of the Assad state – especially in defiance of a specific statement by Barack Obama that such an action would trigger the very US intervention which would have doomed the Assad state - to have used poison gas on the people of Damascus, the city in Syria most easily investigated by outside agencies and media.

Nothing in the actions of that state suggests that it is that crazy.

There is a poignant footnote to this controversy in Patrick Cockburn’s excellent, timely short book on the rise of the Islamic State ‘The Jihadis Return’, reviewed here.

Atrocity stories, always a bad guide to action, have been vital to the case for war. The world, alas, is full of atrocities. Many of them are taking place now in Libya, largely unreported because it is far too dangerous for Western media to go there any more. These horrors are happening because we intervened there ( as we plan to do now in Iraq and Syria) without having a clue about what we are doing. But (rightly) there's no serious clamour for a return. Mr Cameron wants us to forget Libya completely, and no doubt wishes he could. So I hope he'll be asked about it a lot in tomorrow's debate.

Many more horrors will take place in Afghanistan shortly, when the fragile and unsustainable government we have left behind falls apart, as it must. These horrors will be our fault, as have been the years of violence, sectarianism, injustice and needless poverty in Iraq since our misguided 2003 intervention.

I would argue that the recent horrors visited on Yazidis, Kurds and Arab Christians by the Islamic State are also our direct fault. Because we backed away from bombing Syria last year, we often forget the active part which Western (and Gulf) diplomats played in undermining the Assad state for some years before that , actively encouraging rebellion and winking at the flood of foreign fighters, most of them Salafist fanatics, who were allowed into Syria (especially through Erdogan’s Turkey, whose part in these events has been especially irresponsible). The people we now propose to bomb are exactly the same people we proposed to support a year before. Western (and Gulf) intervention created the Islamic State.

By the way, if we so dislike intolerant fundamentalist Islamist regimes that cut people’s heads off in public, then why are we on such good terms with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of our main trading partners and the frequent scene of high-level visits from the British Royal Family? We have learned to live with them. We never helped to destabilize them, preferring for some reason to destroy the (relatively) secular regimes of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and cheering on the overthrow of the (relatively) open and easy-going government of Egypt.

Now that we have completely smashed up the post-1918 order in the Middle East, what is it that makes us think we can now decide what kind of government is going to dominate the region?

I don’t myself understand why we can’t just accept that we no longer rule the world, and must simply put up with the fact that other countries are run differently from ours. My main concern is to retain our liberties and civilisation, not to indulge in failed attempts to bring enlightenment to others by bombing their cities.

It’s not a new idea. We have in our time made accommodations with the Bolshevik murderers of the Tsar and his family, and with the Chinese Communists (who this week shamefully jailed a Uighur professor for the rest of his life, and confiscated his savings, leaving his young family destitute, in a shameful unfair trial . No wonder his poor wife howled with hopeless grief when the ‘verdict’ of the court (if this tribunal deserves the name) was read out.

A good question. We must all wish and hope and pray for their release. We know that several Western governments have paid ransom for hostages held by the Islamic State. Well, why don’t we? We say it’s against our principles. But it isn’t . Our pretence that we don’t pay ransom was exploded in 1998 when (under heavy American pressure to do so) we released huge numbers of convicted criminals, and handed over a large part of our country to rule by terrorist organisations.

We did this in return for promises that the IRA would no longer attack mainland Britain, especially the City of London.

Some would say that the elevation of the late Yasser Arafat to the role of world statesman, and the support of the ‘West’ for a Palestinian State, is likewise an example of a ransom being paid.

As George Bernard Shaw almost said ‘We have established what we are. Why quibble about the price or the details?’

If the hostages held by the Islamic state were my relatives, I would be infuriated by the government’s pretence of puritanical probity. They’ve paid and paid to save their own skins, and would do it again. The terrorists of the world know that our toughness is so much macho bluster. Why not then pay to save a taxi-driver or a journalist from a horrible death? The market for hostages is already flourishing. By standing aside, we won’t reduce it. We’ll just leave people to their fate for a pretence.

3. What about the terror threat to Britain?

Good question. What about it? Why are we so willing to be persuaded by media folk and politicians adopting serious voices and citing ‘security sources’ to make our flesh creep? How can these sources ever be tested or held to account? Why don’t we ever wonder if these huge expensive security organisations we pay for feel the need to puff up their importance, so as to secure their enormous budgets at a time of cuts?

I have seen no serious evidence that there is any such threat. I doubt if the leadership of the Islamic State spends more than a second a day on wondering what we think in London (though they may be more concerned with us if the RAF starts bombing them) . Even if there were such evidence and we could see it for ourselves, terror’s main power in the West comes from our own governments’ readiness to panic and pass repressive laws in response to terror actions which would not have been prevented by such laws, and which are designed to create the very panic we then indulge in. IMost of us, when we beocme adults, ahve learned not to repond to those who goad us into fights. If someone actively wants a fight, it's usually a good reason not to provide him with one. Why do governments still respond to such goasing with the emotional spasms of six-year-olds. Are we in fact governed by responsible adults, or by childish fantasists who have seen too many action movies?

Personally, I should have thought it mathematically more likely for there to be terror attacks on London if we take part on the raids on Iraq, than if we don’t. Islamist terrorists tend to attack countries prominent in attacks on the Islamic world. I can’t recall a terror attack on Zurich lately.

This same wretched argument was used to sustain, years after it should have ended, our ludicrous and now obviously pointless and futile intervention in Afghanistan. In fact terrorists had no need to come to Britain during that period, if they wished to kill British citizens. They were able to do so, in horrible numbers, in Helmand. Have we already forgotten the sad processions through Wootton Bassett? Do we want them to begin again? In a rare example of foresight and planning, the government, who didn’t like the attention these events attracted, have quietly routed such processions away from any urban areas, in the hope that future wars won’t get the same publicity. But the good people of Carterton have so far frustrated this plan, going in large numbers to the route of the corteges, even though it avoids the centre of their town.

4. Will bombing work?

There’s very little reason to think so. Very few conflicts in modern history have been resolved without infantry. But once we start bombing, we are so committed that- if it fails – the pressure to commit soldiers will become relentless and hard to resist. Why start down a road whose end is so obvious and so bad?

The ostensible pretexts for this action are transparently feeble. I am sure that the response of the war party to articles such as this will be smears (as they were when I opposed bombing Syria on behalf of the Jihadists last year). I was slandered then as an apologist for the Assad state. Let us see what they come up with this time. But whatever it is, it will show either that they have no real reason for doing what they plan to do, or that they are not prepared to say in public what that reason is.

Either way, it will do no harm if you put some or all of these points to your elected representative. The election is quite close, and MPs will be readier to listen than at other times. All history shows that wars are easy to start, and very hard to finish. We really ought to learn from this. It is also worth remembering that war is not a video game, that those ‘smart’ bombs you see on the news still dismember, scar and rend, and cannot actually tell an innocent person from a guilty one. And that if you license their use on others, you are, at some point in the unknown future, licensing others to use them on you and yours.

17 November 2013 12:13 AM

This is the season to be soppy about servicemen and women. We buy and wear our poppies, and go on about ‘heroes’, a word which embarrasses soldiers quite a lot.

This is typical of our national doublethink about fighting men. The more we gush about how wonderful they are, the less we spend on the Forces and the less we understand what they do.

And the more we treat them as sentimental figures in stained-glass windows, the more we recoil from the unpleasant reality.

As we prepare to shove a Royal Marine sergeant into jail for killing a wounded enemy, we piously intone ‘we will remember them’ at war memorials.

As we do so, do we really think that the wars of 1914 and 1939 were chivalrous affairs, fought by schoolboys, in which we did no wrong? Does anyone really think we never shot prisoners?

We certainly let them die. I still possess somewhere a card signed by the pitifully few survivors of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst (36 out of a ship’s company of 1,968). Shouldn’t there have been more? My father’s ship, the cruiser Jamaica, had been sent in, with HMS Belfast, to finish off the burning, crippled Scharnhorst with torpedoes on Boxing Day 1943.

He was quite pleased to have been there, but got a bit gruff about the last bit. They had left quite a few German seamen to die horribly in the freezing water and the poisonous fuel oil, and they could be heard calling out for help.

This is a terrible breach of the laws of the sea. But much like Marine ‘A’, most of the British bluejackets present would have muttered, as they steamed away from the screams, that Hitler’s navy would have done the same for them, if things were the other way round. Like Marine ‘A’, they would have been right. The official reason for this was justifiable fear of German U-Boats.

But I suspect that the Russian convoys, an especially merciless theatre of war, had hardened hearts on both sides. In war, good men are ordered by their superiors to do bad things, the opposite of what they would do in peacetime.

They obey because they can see the sense in it. It has always been so. In which case, their superiors had better know that their purpose is justified. They had better win the war, so that the other side doesn’t drag them before a war crimes tribunal. And, in all justice, they should not ask too many questions afterwards.

If our criminal justice system ruthlessly pursued every crime ever committed, then the prosecution of Marine ‘A’ in Afghanistan would be justified and necessary. But we do no such thing. Millions of crimes, some very severe, go unpunished, often for political reasons.

Worse, we now have a political class which likes to go to war solely to make itself look good. Our current Prime Minister so enjoyed his vanity war in Libya that he yearned for another one in Syria.

He models his life and work on Anthony Blair, who knew (if it is possible) even less about the world than David Cameron. This empty person longed to make the planet better with bombs and bullets. The scale of his failure, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still not fully clear, but it is colossal, a pyramid of human skulls as big as the Millennium Dome.

Yet while Marine ‘A’ awaits news of his sentence, and prepares for prison, the Blair Creature wanders the world in luxury, advising despots on good governance and trousering enormous fees for greasy little speeches, pausing only to buy more property.

The Chilcot Inquiry, which ought at least to have shown Blair publicly for what he is, is stalled, perhaps forever. It seems it may never report properly. This is because British officials are blocking the release of documents recording exchanges between Blair and ex-President George W. Bush.

We are now being told this is the Americans’ fault. Perhaps it really is. But why are the men who actually created these wars allowed to hide their private conversations, when the unwise remarks of sergeants and privates can be used in evidence against them, to fling them into jail?

The next time you see Mr Blair wearing a poppy, or see any politician simpering about our ‘wonderful Armed Forces’, remember this. Those who did Blair’s bidding end up dead or maimed, or on trial, ruined and in prison cells. He remains whole, at liberty and rich.

Is a new Royal Train steaming into sight?

Maybe the Royal Train can after all be saved by steam, as I urged the other day.

The people who built the superb new British steam engine Tornado tell me the Queen has given them permission to name a planned new engine The Prince of Wales in honour of Charles’s birthday.

It’s a replica Gresley P2, for those who understand these things.

One of the reasons nasty people like the metric system is that it destroys landmarks and helps them bamboozle the customer. When jam and marmalade were sold by the pound, you could tell when the makers were raising the price.

Now they’re sold by the gram, they quietly shrink the jar instead. And last week, Mars and Cadbury cut the size of Christmas boxes of chocolates (once a reliable two pounds), ‘while keeping prices the same’. That is, they’ve sneakily raised the price.

A big grey shadow is stalking Dave

Is Sir John Major planning a comeback? The terrible thing is that it is not unthinkable.

The talent pool of British politics is shallow and depleted, and full of small croaking creatures so slimy that you can’t tell if they’re frogs or toads. As a result, Sir John now looks like a gigantic figure.

The father of the Cones Hotline and railway privatisation is mysteriously said to be a ‘decent guy’ when his life history suggests he is a master of cunning and a betrayer of promises.

If I were Mr Cameron, I’d be watching out for him.

Sir John is outraged by our lack of social mobility. He seems to blame this on the independent schools. How odd. Britain’s comprehensive state school system, whose main aim is to make us more equal, condemns most of its young victims to exclusion from the elite, while the private schools, whose main aim is still education, waft their lucky products straight on to society’s upper deck.

An intelligent person (are there any in politics?) would understand the real reason, the closure of hundreds of state grammar schools 40 years ago. Labour started this, but Tory governments smashed up hundreds of fine schools from 1970 to 1974 – and then between 1979 and 1997 failed to reopen a single one. Now it would be illegal to do so (one of the laws we actually enforce).

If Sir John wants social mobility, he can find it in Northern Ireland, where a fully selective grammar school system still exists.

There, children from the lower social classes have a much better chance (roughly a third greater) of getting to university than their equivalents on the mainland.

In the four years up to 2011, the town of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire gained fame for repatriations, as the bodies of 345 military personnel killed in conflicts were brought back to the RAF base at Lyneham and driven through its streets - which were lined by thousands of mourners.

“It is entirely right that we publicly honour those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and there are no plans to change the way in which repatriation ceremonies are conducted”

The last cortege passed through the town in August, after which RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire became the landing site for planes returning from conflict zones.’

In July 2011 I began to criticise the government’s plans for bringing the war dead home through RAF Brize Norton. It was not the change to Brize Norton from RAF Lyneham that worried me -that was the consequence of an unconnected change in RAF organisation. It was the way in which the repatriation processions were to be routed. I wrote:

‘HERE'S the truth about the Government's decision to route the hearses of soldiers killed in its various stupid wars away from any of the nation's High Streets.

This comes into effect very soon, when the bodies of the dead start to arrive at RAF Brize Norton, next to the Oxfordshire town of Carterton.

Junior Defence Minister Andrew Robathan stumbled a bit trying to deal with this in Parliament on Monday.

First, he disclosed that the back gate of the RAF base, through which the hearses will pass, is to be renamed the Britannia Gate. Who thinks of these things? The Downing Street cat? Were I to rename the back door of my house the Britannia Door, it would still be the back door.

Then he said that the route through Carterton was unsuitable for corteges because it has speed bumps. So does the bypass route that the processions will actually take, as Mr Robathan ought to know.

He added that Carterton's streets were 'very narrow'. I doubt that they are narrower than those of Wootton Bassett, and plan to check them myself, unless anyone has measurements to hand.

But he was rescued from his confusion by a fellow Unconservative, the North Wiltshire MP James Gray.

Mr Gray asked: 'Does the Minister agree that it might not be possible, nor indeed quite right, to seek to replicate the Wootton Bassett effect elsewhere, as that was a chapter in our history? I am not sure we necessarily want to see it repeated elsewhere.' Mr Robathan eagerly responded, saying Mr Gray had made 'a very good point'. Really? What was so good about it? I wonder who Mr Gray means when he says that 'we' do not want to see Wootton Bassett's spontaneous, unofficial, genuine expression of respect for courage, discipline and loyalty to be repeated. He certainly doesn't speak for me.’

A few days later I bicycled up to Carterton with my trusty measuring tape (Yards, feet and inches only) and recorded :‘I HAVE now measured the road that Defence Minister Andrew Robathan says is 'very narrow', too narrow, apparently, for the hearses containing dead soldiers from Afghanistan.

I went to Carterton, the small town on the doorstep of RAF Brize Norton where the honoured dead will arrive after September. And I measured the Burford Road, just outside the Church of St John the Evangelist, along which the cortege could pass on its way to Oxford, if the authorities had not chosen another route, which carefully avoids the only major High Street nearby.

The road at this point is 22ft wide, which doesn't strike me as specially narrow. Two-way traffic was getting through pretty briskly.

What is more, Carterton, a strikingly modern town with exactly the same population as Wootton Bassett, has plenty of broad pavements on which people might - if they wished - assemble to pay their respects to those who did their duty to the utmost.

Of course, the Prime Minister and his shadowy, rich backers (not all Murdoch employees) dwell just round the corner in the cosy hills above Witney and Chipping Norton. I do wonder what contacts they may have had with the Tory-controlled Oxfordshire County Council that has selected the route. The whole thing is increasingly suspicious.’

And in September I wrote again:

‘THE Government did not like the scenes at Wootton Bassett as the dead came home, and wants to make sure that nothing of the kind ever grows up again in any other place. It wants to be free to conduct more stupid, unwanted wars, without being reminded of the true cost of them.

From now on, the bodies of those soldiers killed in the Afghan conflict will be flown home to RAF Brize Norton, and will no longer pass through Wootton Bassett.

There are acceptable reasons for that. But there is no acceptable reason for what happens next. They will no longer go through the centre of any town, being routed through suburbs and along fast main roads and bypasses where no crowds are likely to gather. They could go a different way. Brize Norton is on the edge of the town of Carterton, with a similar population to that of Wootton Bassett. There is also a perfectly good and rather beautiful route that would take the cortege to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford through the large and lovely village of Bampton.

I have heard the various official explanations for this curious routing, including the shameful, pitiful claim that the roads of Carterton, 22ft wide, are 'too narrow'. I think the time has come to say that these explanations are so much tripe, the sort of thing dictators and despots say.

In a free country, the Government should suffer for its lies.’

I am glad to say that the people of Carterton turned out in splendid numbers, and went to the inconvenient spot which was the only place from which they could salute the returning dead. But it was of course entirely different from the response in Wootton Bassett, where the procession used to pass the church and the shops and the people going about their business. All those parts of Carterton were avoided. The cortege was then driven as I had warned, along fast roads to Oxford, roads along which it was very difficult for people to gather in any numbers.

Now, the document obtained by the Guardian dates from November 2012 and is a recommendation for the future, so it cannot be linked to events before then. And, thank heaven, the number of casualties in Afghanistan has greatly diminished, and involvement in Syria now seems unlikely (though the government can take no credit for the latter) . But we are still entitled to wonder, rather sceptically, about the use of the ‘Britannia Gate’, and what it really means.

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23 June 2013 2:57 AM

If this country still had any spirit, tens of thousands of families would this weekend be resigning from the Girl Guides (or ‘Girlguiding’ as it is now modishly known) and setting up a pro-British, pro-Christian breakaway.An important youth movement, in which young minds are formed, has been taken over by radical revolutionaries, who plan to cut references to nation and God from the Guide ‘promise’ – a pledge they themselves describe as the organisation’s ‘beating heart’.They know what they are doing. The same people long ago captured the schools and universities, which are now factories of Left-wing conformism. Now they want the youth movements as well.But there will be no revolt. This is partly because the New Left are masters of a technique known as ‘salami-slicing’, by which they slowly change the country into somewhere else.Each individual action is so thin a slice that only a few people will mind, and most will jeer at them for caring. ‘Moral panic!’ they will squawk.But once enough of these slices have been taken, it is clear that a deep and lasting change has happened. By then it will be too late. People will quickly forget that Girl Guides were ever Christian or patriotic. And the pledge to honour the Queen – which has been kept for now – will go later.As one of nature’s stroppy non-joiners, I’ve never been a Boy Scout. For me, the joys of the outdoors are overrated.But I can’t help noticing that youth movements have been hugely important in the political struggles of our age. The Russian Communists and the German National Socialists both banned the Scouts and Guides.And both Hitler Youth and Communist Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and even ordered to attack the Church. Pioneers jeered at priests in the street and even campaigned against Christmas trees.Hitler Youths (whose meetings were held at the same time as church services) spied on priests and denounced them for the slightest criticism of the regime.Hitler knew well what he was up to. To those many German adults who refused to follow him, he sneered: ‘When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side”, I say calmly, “Your child belongs to us already . . . what are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community”.’Or, as the brainwashed Hitler Youth sings in the film Cabaret, ‘tomorrow belongs to me’.Parents who struggle to bring up children to love God and country know already how true this is, how their young come home from school stuffed with politically correct equality and diversity rubbish and ignorant of our history and tradition. Now the same process will affect the Guides.Why should this happen? For those who think the Scouts and Guides are too patriotic or too religious, a Left-wing scout movement, the Woodcraft Folk, has long been available. I rather admire them for their independent-minded guts.Long may the Woodcraft Folk flourish in our free, Christian country, but why should the Girl Guides copy them, and introduce this sickly little pledge of selfishness and squidgy loyalty to their ‘community’?You’ll have to ask those who appointed Julia Bentley as the organisation’s chief executive. Ms Bentley is a zealous sexual liberationist, condom outreach worker, Blairite commissar and abortion apologist, so what did they expect?But who, apart from her, actually wants this change? A few months after she was appointed, the Guides sent out a ‘Consultation’ questionnaire. Questions 7, 8 9 and 10 are all about the wording of the promise. I asked, and asked and asked ‘Girlguiding’ to give me figures on how respondents actually answered these questions. They flatly refused to tell me. Draw your own conclusions.

***

Putin told the truth about Syria

When Vladimir Putin pointed out that our supposed allies in Syria include people who cut their dead foes open and bite into their entrails, many media organisations treated this as an allegation or rumour, using words such as ‘reportedly’.Why? Existence of a film of the event was first reported by Time magazine on May 12.Time interviewed two colleagues of the man involved, whose name is Khalid Hamad and who also calls himself Abu Sakkar.They confirmed the story. Then Abu Sakkar was interviewed on video.Far from denying the action, he tried to justify it by saying he had found pictures of atrocities on the dead Syrian soldier’s phone.The organisation Human Rights Watch is also reliably reported to have authenticated the film.Sakkar belongs to the Farouq Brigades, a so-called ‘moderate Islamist’ group of the type David Cameron wants to arm.So, as Mrs Merton might ask, why do the largely pro-intervention British media hesitate to accept that the story is true?

***

It's no use police standing guard AFTER the crime

Though I have no real idea who she is, I am sorry that Helen Flanagan, apparently a soap opera actress, has been burgled.But what possible use was the police officer who was posted outside Ms Flanagan’s Cheshire home?This comically pointless deployment is typical of the new, useless police.They wouldn’t do it for people who aren’t TV stars, and it doesn’t help solve the crime or stop a future one.It just rubs in the awkward fact that, once a crime is committed, a police officer isn’t really much use.Prevention is their job, and they won’t do it.

***

What are prisons for? I suspect that those who run them don’t believe they should exist.They certainly don’t believe in punishment, and without that moral purpose jails are just so many human warehouses.The latest Chief Inspector’s report on Lindholme in Doncaster – available online – is a thing of horror.Prisoners live in fear amid freely-circulating drugs and alcohol. There is more of this than we hear about.

***

As we are now going to talk to the Taliban, will all those who incited, supported and demanded the continuation of a war we were bound to lose please apologise to the families of the dead – especially the families of the British servicemen and women, lions sent by donkeys into pointless danger?Talks were available from the start, but George W. Bush and the Blair creature (donkeys if ever I saw them) were too anxious to conceal their own weakness and ignorance of international affairs to listen.These men should be living out the rest of their lives in penitential Trappist monasteries, praying for forgiveness and cleaning lavatories.Yet they still dare to show their faces in public (and in the case of Blair, are paid for it). They would not dig. They dared not rob. And so they lied to please the mob.

***

The Met Office says we are in for a chain of cold, wet summers? Buy barbecue shares. These warmist zealots long ago lost all contact with reality.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

If this country still had any spirit, tens of thousands of families would this weekend be resigning from the Girl Guides (or ‘Girlguiding’ as it is now modishly known) and setting up a pro-British, pro-Christian breakaway.

An important youth movement, in which young minds are formed, has been taken over by radical revolutionaries, who plan to cut references to nation and God from the Guide ‘promise’ – a pledge they themselves describe as the organisation’s ‘beating heart’.

They know what they are doing. The same people long ago captured the schools and universities, which are now factories of Left-wing conformism. Now they want the youth movements as well.

Girlguiding plan to cut references to nation and God from the Guide 'promise'

Institution admits that the pledge is the 'beating heart' of the traditional Girl Guides

But there will be no revolt. This is partly because the New Left are masters of a technique known as ‘salami-slicing’, by which they slowly change the country into somewhere else.

Each individual action is so thin a slice that only a few people will mind, and most will jeer at them for caring. ‘Moral panic!’ they will squawk.

But once enough of these slices have been taken, it is clear that a deep and lasting change has happened. By then it will be too late. People will quickly forget that Girl Guides were ever Christian or patriotic. And the pledge to honour the Queen – which has been kept for now – will go later.

As one of nature’s stroppy non-joiners, I’ve never been a Boy Scout. For me, the joys of the outdoors are overrated.

But I can’t help noticing that youth movements have been hugely important in the political struggles of our age. The Russian Communists and the German National Socialists both banned the Scouts and Guides.

And both Hitler Youth and Communist Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and even ordered to attack the Church. Pioneers jeered at priests in the street and even campaigned against Christmas trees.

Hitler Youths (whose meetings were held at the same time as church services) spied on priests and denounced them for the slightest criticism of the regime.

Hitler knew well what he was up to. To those many German adults who refused to follow him, he sneered: ‘When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side”, I say calmly, “Your child belongs to us already . . . what are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community”.’

Or, as the brainwashed Hitler Youth sings in the film Cabaret, ‘tomorrow belongs to me’.

Parents who struggle to bring up children to love God and country know already how true this is, how their young come home from school stuffed with politically correct equality and diversity rubbish and ignorant of our history and tradition. Now the same process will affect the Guides.

Why should this happen? For those who think the Scouts and Guides are too patriotic or too religious, a Left-wing scout movement, the Woodcraft Folk, has long been available. I rather admire them for their independent-minded guts.

Long may the Woodcraft Folk flourish in our free, Christian country, but why should the Girl Guides copy them, and introduce this sickly little pledge of selfishness and squidgy loyalty to their ‘community’?

You’ll have to ask those who appointed Julia Bentley as the organisation’s chief executive. Ms Bentley is a zealous sexual liberationist, condom outreach worker, Blairite commissar and abortion apologist, so what did they expect?

But who, apart from her, actually wants this change? A few months after she was appointed, the Guides sent out a ‘Consultation’ questionnaire. Questions 7, 8 9 and 10 are all about the wording of the promise. I asked, and asked and asked ‘Girlguiding’ to give me figures on how respondents actually answered these questions. They flatly refused to tell me. Draw your own conclusions.

Putin told the truth about Syria

Vladimir Putin told the truth about Syria

When Vladimir Putin pointed out that our supposed allies in Syria include people who cut their dead foes open and bite into their entrails, many media organisations treated this as an allegation or rumour, using words such as ‘reportedly’.

Why? Existence of a film of the event was first reported by Time magazine on May 12.

Time interviewed two colleagues of the man involved, whose name is Khalid Hamad and who also calls himself Abu Sakkar.

They confirmed the story. Then Abu Sakkar was interviewed on video.

Far from denying the action, he tried to justify it by saying he had found pictures of atrocities on the dead Syrian soldier’s phone.

The organisation Human Rights Watch is also reliably reported to have authenticated the film.

Sakkar belongs to the Farouq Brigades, a so-called ‘moderate Islamist’ group of the type David Cameron wants to arm.

So, as Mrs Merton might ask, why do the largely pro-intervention British media hesitate to accept that the story is true?

It's no use police standing guard AFTER the crime

Though I have no real idea who she is, I am sorry that Helen Flanagan, apparently a soap opera actress, has been burgled.

But what possible use was the police officer who was posted outside Ms Flanagan’s Cheshire home?

This comically pointless deployment is typical of the new, useless police.

They wouldn’t do it for people who aren’t TV stars, and it doesn’t help solve the crime or stop a future one.

It just rubs in the awkward fact that, once a crime is committed, a police officer isn’t really much use.

Prevention is their job, and they won’t do it.

Helen Flanagn emerges from her home in Prestbury, Cheshire, days after she was burgled

This comically pointless deployment of an officer outside Flanagan's house is typical of the new, useless police

What are prisons for? I suspect that those who run them don’t believe they should exist.

They certainly don’t believe in punishment, and without that moral purpose jails are just so many human warehouses.

The latest Chief Inspector’s report on Lindholme in Doncaster – available online – is a thing of horror

Prisoners live in fear amid freely-circulating drugs and alcohol. There is more of this than we hear about.

As we are now going to talk to the Taliban, will all those who incited, supported and demanded the continuation of a war we were bound to lose please apologise to the families of the dead – especially the families of the British servicemen and women, lions sent by donkeys into pointless danger?

Talks were available from the start, but George W. Bush and the Blair creature (donkeys if ever I saw them) were too anxious to conceal their own weakness and ignorance of international affairs to listen.

These men should be living out the rest of their lives in penitential Trappist monasteries, praying for forgiveness and cleaning lavatories.

Yet they still dare to show their faces in public (and in the case of Blair, are paid for it). They would not dig. They dared not rob. And so they lied to please the mob.

The Met Office says we are in for a chain of cold, wet summers? Buy barbecue shares. These warmist zealots long ago lost all contact with reality.

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10 December 2012 2:49 PM

The Irish problem is one of those, like the Middle East, or rape, or immigration, where any unconventional expression of opinion is dangerous. You will immediately be accused of saying or thinking things that you have not said or thought. Here I seem to have been accused of endorsing ‘Loyalist’ terror and violence, or in some way of lacking sufficient sympathy with the cause of Irish nationalism.

Well, I loathe the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs just as much as I loathe the ‘Republican’ ones, and have always said so. I was particularly rude about Marjorie Mowlam’s disgraceful meeting with the leaders of these squalid organisations. And I see a lot of merit in, and largely sympathise with, Irish patriotism.

When introduced to a collection of ‘Loyalist’ chieftains in Washington DC , I refused to shake their hands ( as I had refused to shake those of the ‘Republican’ apologists). I last week specifically condemned the violent scenes outside Belfast City Hall. I doubt whether any of those responsible had read or heard my opinions. I doubt that many of them can even read. I grow tired of the (frankly stupid, and utterly illogical) assumption that one cannot be against the IRA without being in favour of the ‘Loyalist’ terrorists. Many Irish nationalists loathe and fear the IRA, and have been disenfranchised by the Belfast Agreement, which has rewarded and enhanced the violent Republicans, and marginalised the constitutional nationalists. It’s had a similar but exactly parallel effect on Unionists, destroying the UUP and creating strange process where the Unionist Movement finds a new part every few years, as the existing one turns into a collaborator with Sinn Fein. There’s no escape from this process, as, to be in power-sharing is necessarily to co-operate in the slow doom of the Unionist cause. Once Britain washed its hands of that cause in 1998, it was only a matter of time.

I have a lot of sympathy with Irish Nationalism. I am deeply sorry that it took the violence of 1916 and afterwards to persuade the British governing classes to come up with some sort of Home Rule. It is plain that the unification of the two Parliaments ad never truly worked, and that Ireland, by character and above all by religion, was not the same as the rest of these islands. I also think that the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising was a dreadful tragedy and an appalling mistake, and was one of the many baleful consequences of Britain’s entry into the First World War. Some say that the war avoided a violent confrontation earlier than 1916. I don’t necessarily dispute that, but I think the intervention of the German Empire in our quarrel made it much, much worse, and a sort of fury that we had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Easter Rising of 1916 lay behind the needlessly brutal putting down of an event that was not – until after those cruel counter-measures – widely supported by ordinary Irishmen and Irishwomen.

That episode lies as an uncrossable divide between sensible, civilised, gentle Irish people (the sort who would be broadly conservative in sentiment were they on this side of the Irish sea) and Britain, though I think the recent visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Dublin may have undone some of that very deep damage. I do very much hope so.

I am equally sorry that it took threats of violence to persuade many Irish Nationalists that the Protestants, Ulster-Scots or whatever you want to call them, wanted to remain British. Just as my sympathy for Irish nationalism arises directly out of my own English and British love of country, surely any thoughtful Irish nationalist can see that the Ulster Protestants are a people and need a place in which they can live? Ethnic cleansing and its inevitable horrors were discussed here recently (the post called ‘Orderly and Humane’, about the mass –expulsions of Germans after 1945) . They’re not to be contemplated by any civilised person.

As discussed here earlier, my solution to this would never have been a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant People’, which wasn’t economically or politically sustainable, and was bound to include severe discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority there, but the full integration of part of the North of Ireland into Great Britain. I still think that the experience of direct rule confirms that this arrangement was workable.

I am told that the endorsement of the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland was ‘democratic’ ( as if that necessarily commends itself to me, a sceptic when it comes to the virtues of universal suffrage democracy) .

Well, yes, it was. But I think the referendum was manipulated and improperly influenced, not least by the leaders of all major British political parties, not to mention the President of the United States (claiming to be an Irish Protestant) , campaigning for it in person, with plenty of sickly mentions of his daughter, plus plenty of broadcasting bias. I might add the hastily-arranged concert by ‘U2’ at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, (2,000 free tickets to this were handed out to school sixth-formers). Why was it hastily arranged? Could it have had something to do with a poll in Belfast newspapers which had just shown that Protestants in the 18 to 30 age group were opposed to the agreement by a margin of 40% to 25%, with many undecided?

The Agreement itself, by the way, though distributed in the Six Counties in a soppy cover showing a young family outlined against the sunset on a windy beach, a lovely piece of intangible persuasion almost worthy of the BBC, was never signed by its principal beneficiaries. Thus dozens of media reports of it having been ‘signed’ by all involved were untrue. I discovered this by the simple procedure of ringing up the Northern Ireland Office and asking. My fellow-reporters didn’t. Yet they breezily and repeatedly said it had been signed. Even today I can win bets by asking people who signed it. This typifies the gullible coverage of the matter in the British press. I asked, because I had good reason to suspect that this would be so, knowing some Irish history. (By the way, having read the text again, I think the agreement highly ambiguous on whether a vote is needed in the Irish Republic to confirm a vote in the Six Counties for a united Ireland. You could easily read the Irish vote of May 1998 as implicitly endorsing unity. In any case, it’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that voters in the Republic would vote against union with the North. I am happy to discuss these details if anyone wants to).

I would also draw readers’ attention to Anthony Blair’s famous ‘five-point hand-written pledge’ of 20th May 1998, plainly designed to influence a vote that had begun to look doubtful. I have it here in front of me, as I always thought it would be one to keep. Two of these pledges, which I reproduce without comment, were ‘Those who use or threaten violence excluded from government’ and ‘prisoners kept in jail unless violence is given up for good’.

I am taken to task for my attack on Bill Clinton’s cynicism, by ‘Bob, Son of Bob’ . he seems to be saying ‘Tough,, that’s democracy’. Well, it may well be so, and in that case it merely adds to my dislike if universal suffrage democracy, a system of manipulation and bribery which is fast bringing the Free World to its knees.

But in general, he misses the point. First, it’s my view that any country which intervenes in our internal affairs should be opposed. Any country which does not maintain its sovereignty against threats will soon cease to be a country. No nation which intervenes in this way can possibly be a ‘friend’, though it might on some future occasion be an *ally* of convenience, or have been one in the past. Allies are seldom friends, and often enemies. It was up to su to determine the outcome of the IRA’s long campaign of criminal violence.

Second, he misses the point, which si the utter cynicism of the engagement. Clinton had no concern for Ireland. He discovered the issue in search of votes and money in 1992. It was purely cynical. He wasn’t a Roman Catholic. He was in favour of abortion. He knew his party had lost many Roman Catholic working class votes through its support of abortion. He had no intention of changing his view on that. So he decided to win some of them back, in several key electoral college states, by courting the ghastly sentimental, ignorant Irish feeling which, alas, flourishes among perfectly kind, pleasant people in the USA. He also sought money for his very expensive style of campaigning (see below). By 1994, after his bad failure in the mid-terms, his Irish-American money backers saw their chance to make him care. They came to him and said it was time he delivered. This coincided with John Hume’s campaign for ‘The Irish Dimension’, and an Irish intellectual fashion for Sinn Feinery (see if you can find Edna O’Brien’s astonishing article about Gerry Adams, penned for the ‘New York Times’ during this era. It’s a treat.

Clinton, staring the possibility of defeat in the 1996 election in the face, acceded. The price was a visa for Gerry Adams. The whole process is brilliantly described in a book by my good friend Conor O’Clery , ‘The Greening of the White House’, which ranks alongside ‘Pressure Group Politics’ by H.H.Wilson (a study of the lobby for commercial TV in Britain) as a textbook of how politics actually work.

Mr ‘BSOB’ argues ; ‘Peter Hitchens could have gone for a much simpler explanation for USA support of the GFA - that politicians who need votes in the USA were listening to a vocal group within their own electorate that is certainly no ally of Britain – the Irish-Americans’

Well, yes, I could have. But it would have been so simple, that it would have been wrong, and far less interesting than the more complex truth. Irish America has always had a big vote. JFK benefited greatly from it (but never backed the IRA) Ronald Reagan was undoubtedly influenced by it, but never backed the IRA. It probably saved Eamon de Valera’s life at one point. But never before the Clinton Presidency did it compel the White House to back the IRA against the British government.

Then he misses another point. He says ‘the bit about Serbia implies that Americans are scornful of us in the way that, say, the French are, and he draws this conclusion because he finds a policy in which Britain and the USA are not united. But as British MPs are themselves not united on this issue, we cannot expect USA to be united with us – should they unite with the pro or anti GFA British MPs?’

No, I simply point out that this very senior official (closely linked in fact to Teddy Kennedy, though not herself Irish) had the view that she had. It is quite different from the French view, which is an intimate rivalry going back for centuries (see that fine book ‘That Sweet Enemy’ by Mr and Mrs Tombs, he English, she French) . It is based on the view (shared by my late brother in his post-2001 years) that the USA is a post-revolutionary Utopia and the rest of the planet a fit place for it to impose its will by force, for the good of the inhabitants. At the time of the conversation there was no ‘GFA’ for anyone to be in favour of . the ‘GFA’ came five years later, after Britain had been compelled first to treat with, then to give in to the IRA – a process much aided by absurd propaganda attempts to claim that the IRA has disarmed, for which thre has never been any independent evidence.

He asks :’ Does Peter Hitchens argue that alliances can only exist in cases where both parties in the alliance agree fully on all issues?’. No, he doesn’t. Where has he ever said any such thing? But I am not sure in what we are allied with the USA, and against what common enemy? The USA not only actively favours our absorption into the EU, the single greatest threat to our existence as a nation. It has compelled us to capitulate to a criminal terrorist gang. In what way is it helping us? We have sent troops to fight and die, quite against our national interest, in Iraq and Afghanistan , to aid American ends and make the Iraq operation(in particular ) look less like the unilateral irruption it was. Now we are being dragooned into boosting Saudi Arabia’s interests in the Middle East. This is not just one way. It is absurd.

Finally, he says :’ America is one of the few countries where anyone from England can emigrate to and both a) already know the language and culture b) not feel a hostility directed towards him for being English.’

Well, up to appoint. In increasingly large and important areas of the USA the dominant language is Spanish. This is becoming more common, not less, and will continue to do so. And if Mr ‘BSOB’ has never experienced American hostility to the British, then I am glad. I have, and friends of mine have, and I would add that Hollywood (especially in such films as ‘The Patriot’, but also in many others where English actors end up playing supercilious, cold villains) often reinforces the lingering resentment of Britain to be found in a certain type of American.

Many, it is true (perhaps even most), barely know who or where we are and make no connection between the phrase ‘English language’ and ‘England.

The Home Affairs Committee Report on drugs is remarkably dull, and seems to have been something of a damp squid, barely mentioned by many newspapers this morning. It is interesting that the committee chose to visit Portugal, which, as I have mentioned here before, is not perhaps the poster-boy for decriminalisation that the Cato Institute, itself far from neutral, has claimed (there are varying accounts of this episode, and I would say the jury was still out).

But they did not visit Sweden, one of the few advanced countries which has not followed the fashion for going soft on cannabis, or Greece (which one correspondent tells me has been conducting a fairly stringent campaign to clamp down on drugs. I am looking into this) .

They have entirely accepted several ideas which seem to me to be still in dispute – they believe that attempts to interdict demand by punishing possession are doomed, they are sure that ‘harm reduction’ works, and if they are even aware that cannabis might have some mental health dangers, I could find no sign of it in the electronic report I have been sent.

The government which has quietly decriminalised drug possession anyway, without frightening the voters by actually admitting to this policy, can use the report as a chance to triangulate itself against the wild men, and look responsible. I doubt whether the call for a Royal Commission (takes minutes, lasts years) will be heeded.

I decided some months ago to withdraw from the battle, or whatever it is , over Homosexual Marriage. It is a trap for conservatives, entirely aimed at winding them up and tempting them into arguments where they can be falsely portrayed as cruel bigots. It is a total diversion from the real battle, over the future of marriage as such.

But I would make this point. Those in the Tory Party who regard themselves as social and moral conservatives have often reposed some sort of faith in Al (‘Boris’) Johnson and in Michael Gove as hopes for the future. Well, both of these gentlemen have come out strongly in favour of same-sex marriage. This is no surprise to me. There is no hope in the Tory Party. Please believe me.

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13 October 2012 8:16 PM

What else are they keeping from you? I now discover that I am almost the only journalist who didn’t know that Jimmy Savile was a child molester.

If they all knew, why didn’t they tell you? And what, exactly, is the point of the police investigating the misdeeds of a corpse? What will they do if they find a case to answer? Refer it to the CPS? Put his cadaver on trial and send it to prison?

Well, let them explain all that. What’s much, much more important is that you now know that there is a lot going on that nobody tells you.

They don’t tell you because they’re scared that very rich men can use the libel courts to ruin those who tell the truth about them.

Remember Robert Maxwell? He’s dead, too. But do you think he has no living equivalents?

They don’t tell you because there are powerful commercial or political interests involved. Or because journalists themselves have bad consciences. Or because a lie is much more comforting and convenient than the truth.

That is why the risky drugging of healthy children, said to have the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’, continues, rather than being exposed for what it is by an angry press.

It is why the myth of ‘dyslexia’, which hides the deliberate refusal of our schools to teach reading by tried and effective methods, is still current.

It is why very senior politicians are not properly questioned or pursued about their own use of illegal drugs, not in their teens or student years, but during their adult lives.

It is why our political parties, fraudulent, bought-and-paid-for and secretly scornful of their own voters, repeatedly betraying their supporters’ dearest wishes, survive long after they should have been used for landfill.

It is why the country is carpeted with worse-than-useless windmills, and why the fanatical false religion of man-made global warming is the faith that nobody dares to question.

If Jimmy Savile’s long and uninterrupted career of despicable crime teaches us anything, it is to hold hard to that old but reliable motto ‘Never Believe Anything Until It Has Been Officially Denied’.

Cameron steals the applause of real heroes

Party conference speeches have always been unfit for human consumption. But the Prime Minister’s performance last week was specially repulsive.

It wasn’t just the repeated lie that he used Britain’s veto in Brussels. It wasn’t his attempt to appropriate the Queen. It wasn’t just the faintly distasteful way in which he referred to what really ought to be personal matters.

The bit that filled me with cold fury, and had me trying very hard not to swear at the TV screen, or to hurl objects at it, was Mr Slippery’s reference to the members of the Armed Forces who have died in Afghanistan.

It should never be forgotten that in 2009, Mr Slippery bought the support of the Murdoch press by fervently endorsing this futile deployment. By doing so, he condemned many people, far better than he, to death or to severe lifelong disability.

If he had not sold his tongue to The Sun, and if he had had the courage to do as Canada did, and put an end to the bloodshed, many of them would now be alive or whole.

So it is a shocking shame for him to have the nerve to use these honoured dead to trigger a standing ovation at a political rally for his dying, divided and discredited party.

When he departs public life in 2015, I hope he devotes quite a lot of time to atoning for this.

I don't want to fight a burglar

The new ‘tough’ Injustice Secretary, Christopher Grayling, promises us the freedom to do horrid things to burglars.

This betrays a doltish misunderstanding of the problem. I don’t know about Mr Grayling, but I’m not that confident of winning a fight with a rangy, drugged-up young thief on the landing in the middle of the night. I simply don’t want him to be there at all.

And that means a combination of swift, severe deterrent punishment in austere prisons (which the Useless Tories don’t believe in), and a police force that patrols on foot again (which they also don’t believe in). These people have nothing useful to say.

Well, I suppose we can be grateful that the EU didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Economics. And, like you, I can hardly stop laughing at the award of the Peace Prize.

But there is a sense in which the EU has brought peace. It has done so by allowing France, and more recently Britain, to pretend to be independent powers, while actually being vassals of Germany.

And it has allowed Germany to be the imperial ruler of Europe while pretending to be a Europeanised, neutered nothingness.

Prescribe this for your GP

You might not expect me and Dr Ben Goldacre to be allies. I think it fair to say that Dr Goldacre, famous for his exposures of ‘bad science’, sees himself as a man of the Left.

But Mr Goldacre’s new book, Bad Pharma, exposes the appalling abuse of our trust by the big drug companies, which suppress unwelcome results from clinical trials, and which market remedies on the basis of myths.

Try this: ‘Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients.’

It gets worse. Analysis is flawed – by design – to make the drugs look better than they are. The results tend to favour the makers. When those makers don’t like research results, they are allowed to hide them. Yes, they really are.

This is an immensely important book, with vast implications for our health – and if your GP hasn’t read it, you should insist that he or she does so, soon.

I am still waiting for Edward Miliband’s office to tell me if the Labour leader was given private tuition during his time at a comprehensive school. It’s now 11 days since I asked. Any former tutors, if they exist, are very welcome to get in touch.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, asks: ‘How can we justify giving flats to young people who have never worked, when working people twice their age are still living with their parents because they can’t afford their first home?’

How indeed? Yet as long as the State aggressively subsidises fatherless families, and as long as the Tory Party slanders opponents of this mad policy as ‘persecuting single mothers’, it will go on, and the results will be as bad as they have always been.

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22 September 2012 10:00 PM

Parliament sentenced hundreds of innocent people to death when it arrogantly abolished hanging in 1965. Many of those innocent people have yet to meet their killers, but that meeting will inevitably come.

Hundreds more, also thanks to the smugness of our sheltered power elite, will instead be horribly, terrifyingly injured.

But – because our medical skills have grown while our common sense has shrunk – they will survive to live damaged, darkened lives.

On the long list of Parliament’s victims, both dead and wounded, are many police officers. Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes, may they rest in peace, are just the latest.

Nobody can really claim to be surprised by this. In August 1966, a few months after the death penalty was got rid of, three police officers were murdered close to Wormwood Scrubs Prison.[related]

Our once-peaceful country was so shocked that a memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey for the three – Geoffrey Fox, Stanley Wombwell and Christopher Head.

But the Prince of Liberal Smugness, the then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, airily dismissed calls for a return of the gallows. ‘I will not change my policy in the shadow of recent events, however horrible,’ he said, in a statement of such bone-headed obstinacy that it ought to be carved on his tombstone.

If the murder of three policemen by an armed gang of crooks, months after hanging was abolished for that very offence, was not a reason to change a policy, then what would change his mind? The answer was that nothing would.

Like all such people, he knew he was right, and ‘civilised’ – and neither the facts nor common sense would change what he pleased to call his mind.Now, after the Manchester killings, there has been an attempt to divert us into an argument about arming the police. Almost every account of these deaths, rather oddly, stressed that the two officers were unarmed.

Why? There’s no suggestion that Fiona Bone or Nicola Hughes would have been safer if they had been armed. Do we want to turn the police into executioners? In any case, the police of this country are armed, and have been for years.

Not all of them carry weapons, but the proud boast of this country in my childhood, that we were the only major nation whose police did not carry guns, long ago ceased to be true.

We weren’t asked about it. But then again, we weren’t asked about abolishing the death penalty. No political party ever put that policy in its manifesto. To this day it has not been properly discussed.

Few people understand that supporters of the gallows never pretended it would deter all murders. They believed it deterred criminals from carrying lethal weapons.

We have in fact had two experiments to see if this is so. The death penalty was suspended in this country for much of 1948, while Parliament debated (and rejected) its abolition. It was suspended again from August 1955 to March 1957, during a similar debate. After 1957 the penalty was much weaker, though it still protected police officers.

Colin Greenwood, a retired policeman, studied the statistics and found a marked leap in violent and armed offences during 1948, followed by a return to the previous level. There was another rise in 1956-57, followed by a slight fall. There was a third significant rise in the mid-Sixties, which has continued more or less ever since.

The carrying and use of guns and knives by criminals just grows and grows. Jay Whiston, whose dreadful death I mentioned last week, is one victim of this. The Manchester police officers are two more.

But these are the cases we all hear about. Far, far more common are dreadful events in which heroic doctors and nurses save the lives of people who would undoubtedly have died of comparable wounds 50 years ago.

Last week, in my beautiful, civilised home town, Oxford, two men were jailed for attacking Kirk Smith in his home, in a petty, moronic robbery – of £20 and two phones.

Abdul Adan, 21, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years (in reality he will serve half that) for stabbing Mr Smith four times, after first smashing his nose. Mr Smith’s wounds were appalling. They ‘bared his intestines’, as the court report puts it. Adan’s accomplice, Michael Edwards, 25, got three-and-a-half years, which of course he will not serve in full.

Did these assailants care whether they killed him? Did they, in fact, fear the law at all? How many such crimes have been and will be committed in our supposedly civilised, liberal country this year? More than you think.

Are any of us safe in our homes, or on the streets, or on late-night buses and trains, from people such as this? Will anything be done to put it right?

You know the answer.

And people wonder why I despise politicians and all their works.

IS BEING HONEST REALLY SUCH A SHOCK?

I never thought much of Mitt Romney, but all these leaks have made me warm to him. Why is it a ‘gaffe’ to be honest?

Left-wing politicians do bribe millions of voters with welfare handouts, paid for from the taxes of Right-wing voters.

And the Arab leadership in Gaza and the West Bank have no interest in permanent peace with Israel.

We say we want truthful politicians, but when we get them, we fling up our hands in mock shock.

SEEING SENSE ON A POINTLESS WAR

It is good to see that conventional wisdom is now coming round to the view that our military presence in Afghanistan is a pointless and bloody waste of time.

Parliament is actually debating it.

Why, in a few months, everyone will want to leave, and most of them will believe that they have thought so all along. Well, they didn’t.

When I began my long campaign for withdrawal, in November 2001, the Afghan war was a ‘good war’. In 2006, when Comrade Doctor Lord John Reid committed us more deeply, saying, absurdly, ‘We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot’, the intervention was still popular.

Peter Mandelson said that you have to go on saying something long after you are sick of saying it before anyone will take any notice. This is true.

But so many have died in the meantime. Why are we so slow to see the truth?

Sarah Catt goes to jail for eight years (four, really) for aborting a big baby, in the final week of pregnancy.

But it’s perfectly legal to abort a small baby, to call it a ‘foetus’ instead of a human being, and to sneer that it is ‘just a blob of jelly’.